It's about knowing the score

Michael Evans

''This is not a rational business decision, this is more of an emotional business decision,'' the investment banker says.

''Every once in a while in life, you have to go with your heart a little bit and this is one of them.''

When the Sydney Kings faced off last night against the Melbourne Tigers in the National Basketball League for the first time in two years, it did not just mark the resurrection of a once-prominent sporting club.

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Bundy, a former Merrill Lynch Australia boss, is part of a 10-strong syndicate, which includes Myer chief executive Bill Wavish and private bus king Jim Bosnjak, who have each tipped in $2 million to raise the Kings from the dead after its collapse at the centre of the Firepower fuel pill fraud.

Bundy, who grew up in New York City and won a basketball scholarship to Yale, doesn't expect the business to return a cent.

''When I enter a property deal or a stock deal, I expect to get a return. Sometimes in life you have to look at things differently.''

The big-name investors are the latest in a long tradition of Australian businessmen mixing business and sport.

Once it was the old school tie that was everything, particularly the link between the investment community to rugby-playing private schools in Sydney and AFL in Melbourne. Over the years, wealthy businessmen and investors have rubbed shoulders around the board table of clubs they barracked for as children.

And while the return of the Kings in the niche basketball market bridges the gap between the winter codes and the start of the cricket season, a fresh breed of sports-loving businessmen with a bigger agenda has arrived on the scene.

The likes of mining magnate

rich-listers including Clive Palmer (Mineralogy), Nathan Tinkler (Aston Resources) and Tony Sage (Cape Lambert) are buying into A-League soccer clubs - all too aware of the ability of their investment to carry influence in their key customer markets.

Mining magnates, riding high from the global resources boom, are pinning their sporting stripes to the world game to gain greater access and exposure, dragging the fledgling local game on for the ride.

Ben Buckley, the boss of Football Federation Australia - and himself a former AFL player - is only half-joking when he tells BusinessDay: ''We're almost like a resources index.''

THE links between sport and business in Australia are deep, cultural and entrenched.

From the stables: Gerry Harvey, John Singleton, Lloyd Williams; to the rugby league boardrooms: Mark McInnes, Paul Fiani and Max Delmege.

Australian men love their sport but prominent and well-connected Australian businessmen - and this list is very much male-dominated - want a piece of it.

As an immigrant outsider, American-born banker Bundy has seen the power of the connections up close.

''Within the finance community in Sydney there's a strong rugby contingent - in America, your university is very important - if you went to Yale, Harvard or Princeton, that's very well-connected on Wall Street.

''What I find in Sydney finance, it's very much Joeys, Riverview, Shore, these guys played rugby together. That's a lot of the decision-makers in Sydney. If you went down to Melbourne, you know, played rules football or went to Melbourne Grammar, there's clearly social connections. These are ties that bind.

Sydney Swans director and investment banker Andrew Pridham believes that world is breaking down. ''I think those days are genuinely gone. The world is too competitive,'' he says. What's more, the money isn't being made in the hugely competitive market of running and owning club sport in Australia, where four football codes battle for winter supremacy. Rather it's in the media, marketing and advertising world where moguls such as Kerry Packer bought the best players to create World Series Cricket and Rupert Murdoch tried to build a rugby ''Super League'' as content for television.

Increasingly, wealthy businessmen and investors are emerging as directors and advisers to sporting clubs.

For example, the Sydney Roosters rugby league club includes a host of big-name businessmen as directors and members of an elite wealthy chairman's fund-raising club, including former David Jones boss Mark McInnes, Channel Nine boss David Gyngell, funds manager Paul Fiani and Wizard Home Loans founder Mark Bouris.

Involvement at board level brings business experience to running sporting franchises and networking - but not riches, says Pridham.

''One of the reasons you don't make money in sport is you have to look at why is a sporting club in existence. At the Swans we call it the emotional balance sheet. In the credits are winning premierships and the debits are a bad season.

''Because it's so competitive on the field, clubs tend to spend money to better themselves on field rather than to do up the balance sheet with tens of millions of dollars in the bank. That's one of the reasons there's no money in it because as you get more money you spend it to be more competitive on the field. It's not trying to deliver a financial dividend to anyone.''

THE global reach of the resources boom and soccer are attracting a different type of sporting businessman with different ambitions to those in the domestic codes.

Six years into its latest regeneration, soccer in Australia has attracted a host of big-name businessmen to the table, including the figurehead of the sport in Australia, Frank Lowy, the Westfield shopping centre founder and the country's richest man. Hospital and media baron Paul Ramsay (Sydney FC) and leisure empire Belgravia Group founder Geoff Lord (Melbourne Victory) are among the prominent businessmen to have equity stakes in A-League sides.

But the global footprint of soccer and its popularity in Asia - which is the destination for much of Australia's resources - are what are attracting the likes of former rugby league winger Clive Palmer.

The Mineralogy boss with a $4 billion fortune has made little secret of his ambitions with a football team.

''I've got a lot of friends in China that support the national team up there,'' he said on launching his team, Gold Coast United, in 2008. ''China is part of our community. We've got to get together, talk, exchange ideas, and certainly sport is a great medium to do that.''

Palmer has suggested the team hire Chinese players and wants to win the A-league competition to gain the club entry to the Asian Champions League to receive even greater exposure for his interests.

While the profitability of domestic football clubs is questionable, the flipside for mining magnates is the access and status that a club can generate.

Tony Sage, who runs Cape Lambert and owns the Perth Glory A-League club, told BusinessDay last year that while he was losing money on Perth Glory, he made up for it elsewhere. And he too acknowledges the club provides him with an entree to decision-makers at a local level for his business.

''They know I own the club and that opens doors,'' he said.

Sage recounted how he found himself in Buenos Aires trying unsuccessfully to get a drilling permit for a uranium mine. He was invited to the match between River Plate and Boca Juniors. At half-time, he was in the president's box when he was introduced to the director-general of Argentina's Mines Department, a River fanatic. ''We exchanged a few pleasantries, and then I told him I'd been having a lot of trouble getting a permit,'' Sage recalled. ''Three weeks later, it arrived in the post.''

Australia's richest man under 40, Nathan Tinkler, with a fortune of more than $600 million, has a wide range of sporting investments. He is a horse breeder, owning the Patinack Farm and also recently bought Dick Johnson's V8 racing venture.

And he has just bought the Newcastle Jets A-League side. Tinkler rejects any suggestion his motivation in owning the Jets relates to building business networks offshore.

''While success in football is measured by our on field success, we want to create a brand that is also successful off the field with the people in our local community,'' he says. ''That is my motivation, not to build overseas or local business contacts.''

FFA has sought to discourage a single-owner based system and looks to a community-based system given the concerns over a club's stability being too closely linked to the financial fortunes of one owner.

Tinkler took control at the Newcastle Jets after the FFA stripped Con Constantine of his licence, proving the rise of new-money mining magnates has been unstoppable. FFA's Ben Buckley says the investments of mining magnates in the A-League ''is a reflection of a sector going extremely well in the national economy''.

FOR SOME businessmen, sport and its networks provide everything from redemption to solace. Just months after the collapse of his Allco Finance Group, which cost investors billions, David Coe was a pariah in Sydney. In London, it was another story, with Coe spotted enjoying the Ashes cricket action at Lord's in the company of television personality Michael Parkinson.

Coe was back in the fold working on his interest in Sport & Entertainment Ltd, a sports management and merchandising firm which provides merchandising to Cricket Australia. SEL's involvement in the V8 series has also seen Coe's interests working closely with the biggest names in Australian business, including Seven Group.

Phil Green wasn't so lucky. The former boss of the failed Babcock & Brown was ejected from the board of the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust following the collapse of his investment company and remains an isolated figure in the Sydney eastern-suburbs business community.

Earlier this week, media scion Lachlan Murdoch was blindsided, with his investment in Indian Premier League Twenty20, the Rajastan Royals, thrown out of the competition.

Former David Jones boss Mark McInnes, who resigned in disgrace after admitting improper conduct towards a female staff member, has also reportedly sought solace in his directorship of the Roosters rugby league club.

He attended the NRL grand final and was filmed by Channel Nine's cameras celebrating a Roosters try. Channel Nine chief executive David Gyngell is a member of the Roosters high-powered business group the Chairman's Club.

When the late Dick Pratt faced price-fixing allegations at his Visy box enterprise, it was his Carlton club friends who rallied around him.

For the likes of Eddy Groves, the founder of failed childcare enterprise ABC Learning, sport left him nowhere. While investors lost billions, Groves lost his empire, including control of his basketball team the Brisbane Bullets.

Building cachet on the field on the way up is all well and good, as long as there's enough cash to cushion the fall on the way down.